Ugly Puggly 14

Ugly Puggly’s room was messy and and stunk of urine and weak bleach. Clothes were piled on an unmade bed. A half-eaten bread roll in the bin.  He might have tidied up if he knew we were coming, but probably wouldn’t. He’d a care-assistant for that kind of thing, shadowing him in the ward. He was bald with a ginger beard with bad teeth and a belly that he had to manhandle around doors. He’d that look of a patient mimicking staff. I checked his scruffy uniform and glanced at his name badge.

The bread roll was probably his.  Ushering Dave and me out of the room, he explained we shouldn’t be there, and should return to the visiting room. He meant the kitchen area, which was set up with tea and coffee, and enough spaces between tables so patients could hunch over hot drinks and shout embarrassing things at their mum and dad. My son, Luke, had once asked if Ugly Puggly was sent to hospital because he was naughty.

‘Yeh,’ I’d told him.

‘Will I get sent there too if I’m naughty?’ His big liquid brownish eyes looking at my face and blinking rapidly as he waited for a reply.

‘You bet.’

When Luke got older he was less prone to belief me. I added all the other things he could get sent away for such as having epileptic fits, hallucinations, showing signs of psychosis, syphilis, gonorrhoea, or any other venereal disease.  But that was only if you were a woman, or worst of all, a pregnant woman. For a man these things were fine and not really your fault, I reassured him. Bedwetting was a sure-fire sign, but Luke didn’t wet his bed. Masturbation was something we didn’t talk about. It too was a mental illness that ran in the same families as the nail-biters. Those with irrational fears were most to be feared and locked up, because they didn’t even know what they were scared of. Ugly Puggly was ahead of the game, he was scared that global warming would end civilisation in our lifetime. He was perfectly sane about that. He was thinking of my son Luke, before I even knew he was in danger. I guess we owed him one.

‘How’d you get up here, train?’ Ugly Muggly asked.

‘Van,’ I replied. ‘Doesnae cost us anything. Revenge of the taxpayer.’  I started telling them the story of when the council had a petrol pump for their machinery, which was meant to be a saving, but guys were coming from Australia, returning home, to fill up. But nobody was listening.

We sat in the kitchen as foursome, chairs pulled tight. Dave and me on one side of the table. Ugly Puggly and the care assistant on the other. Digestive biscuits were on the care assistant’s side of the table. He was munching his way through them. In the old days there would have been ashtrays and we’d all of have choked to death, smoking twenty fags in half an hour.

Dave stared at the care assistant as if he had stolen something and he leant over and rubbed his soft hair against my shoulder. I pushed him away. ‘Whit you daeing?  Are you crazy?’ I asked him. Then apologised to Ugly Puggly about the crazy jibe, because there was only room for one mad person per table.

We quickly ran out of things to say and I was staring at the clock above the serving hatch. I sighed. It was always the same. ‘How did you get lifted anyway?’ I asked Ugly Puggly.

‘Oh,’ he laughed, showing the fillings in his teeth. ‘That’s a story.’

We waited, but he sipped at his black tea.

Dave prompted him by reminding him that the police had come to the door, but Ugly Puggly had told him to ignore them. They’d just go away. Because they hated doing that kind of job for somebody else. And if the mental health service locked somebody up, it should really make sure they stayed locked up. A turf war.  

‘That’s true,’ said the care assistant, leaning forward and nodding. ‘I could tell you a few stories that would make your blood run cold.’

Another patient in a tracksuit wandered past and grabbed the biscuits and marched off with them.

‘Cunt,’ the care assistant said into his beard and licked his lips.

Ugly Puggly perked up. ‘Your blood can’t run cold,’ he told him. ‘If you’re dead, your blood doesn’t run. And if it’s cold, it pools rather than runs.’

The chair scraped on the tiles as I pushed it back. ‘Aye,’ I said, yawning. ‘We know that fae the movies, but time we were goin’.

I gave the bottom of Dave’s chair a nudge with my toecap. ‘We better be going,’ he said brightly, on cue. Lifting his eyebrows up into the ceiling and bringing them back down and smiling brightly, like you would at a group of very small children.  

‘You’ll need to let us out,’ I told the care assistant.

He nodded. I will, but made no sign of moving. Screwed his face up and turned to Ugly Puggly. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten the code.’

‘1672,’ said Ugly Puggly. ‘I’m on probation here,’ he explained. ‘When they get bored following me about they’ll pick on somebody else. They write down everything I do or say. And when you start doing that it’s like a game of Chinese whispers. Everybody adds their own wee bits on and anybody can seem crazy.’

‘That’s no true,’ said the care assistant.

‘You’ll need to write it down then for it not to be true,’ said Ugly Puggly. ‘That’s whit I said to the guys that came to arrest me. They were chapping the door and one of them shouted, “Is anybody in there?” And the other one peered through the letterbox and said, “We know yer in there.”

‘They were too clever by half. I thought they might want to discuss the problem of dualism of mind and body and Descartes’ Cartesian dilemma.’

‘Fuck off,’ I stood up. ‘You and yer books.’ I nodded in his direction and said out of the side of my mouth to Dave. ‘When he was in his ma’s womb, they did a scan and even then he was reading a children’s encyclopaedia. The letters were so small they flew away like midges after he’d read them, and it interfered wae the working of the machinery. So it started rattling and burned out.’  

‘Did it?’ asked Dave.

I guffawed and Ugly Puggly rolled his eyes. Even the care assistant threw back his head and laughed.

‘Fuckin hell,’ I said. ‘I didnae think yeh were that thick.’

‘Don’t call me thick,’ he replied.

‘Alright, then, stupid.’ I patted his shoulder. ‘Let’s go hame then, Cinderella.’